“But we really did nothing,” he began again. - We just ...
I saw Gus's hand tighten on the collar of his T-shirt, and Andrew stopped.
“I will never come here again,” he said.
“Good,” Gus answered. - I believe you. And now, before you leave, you will help me put these shelves back on the tree, right?
Mark and Andrew nodded. Gus let them go. For a moment it seemed to me that they were about to flee, but then my brother turned to the tree. Gus and he mounted the shelves back into place, and Lisa and I stood on the edge of the meadow, watching them.
“Well, that's fine,” Gus said when they finished. “Now get out of here.”
The boys walked to the edge of the clearing in a step, and then rushed to run. The fox crossed the clearing and stood next to her father; I stayed where I stood, waiting for him to begin to give us a lecture - I had no doubt about it. We should not have started, we should not have thrown stones. We did everything wrong.
For a while he did not say anything, then looked down at the Fox.
“If I'm not around, it's better not to mess with violators,” he asked softly.
“Okay,” the Fox said. “Probably better.”
He touched her shoulder with a hand.
- Are you okay?
- Yeah. I'm great.
“Well,” he nodded, “I still needed a break.” But now, I think I'd better get back to work.
And he went to the house, never starting a lecture. I stared after him, then looked at Lisa.
“You know, your dad is not like any of those I met.”
She smiled and nodded.
- Yes I know. She glanced in the direction the boys had run away. “He seems to be right - they will never return.”
- Yeah.
“You have a good throw,” she said. “You celebrated your brother great.” Why did you decide to ask dad to let him go?
I shrugged, feeling a little awkward.
“He was already scared enough already.” And if the cops brought him home, my father ... - I stopped, unable to describe how terrible it would be. “He would have really had a hard time.”
The fox frowned at my face.
- Come on. Everything is fine.
When I returned home, my brother was waiting for me in the backyard. He sat on one of the chairs there, doing nothing. I stopped, barely entering the gate.
“I should have beaten you for throwing stones at me,” he said.
I remained standing near the gate, ready to run away. I shrugged nervously.
“I asked Gus to let you go.”
- Yeah. - He continued to carefully examine me. “How do you know this guy?”
- He is the father of my girlfriend.
- Andrew says that this is some kind of ragged biker. He says that he is dangerous and that we must tell the cops to him.
I remembered tattoos and a motorcycle next to the house.
“He writes books,” I said. - In fact, he is the right man. - I started toward the back door.
- Hey Joan! He called to me. He leaned forward, sitting on a chair, his hands clenched into fists.
- What? - I stopped.
“Thank you for asking him to let me go.”
I looked at him incredulously. My brother has never thanked me for anything.
- Yeah. It's my pleasure.
“You're not going to talk about this, are you?”
“I will not tell anyone.”
“Well then,” he leaned back in his chair with a look of relief.
“You know, Andrew says this girl has a roof that's not in place.” At school everyone laughs at her.
I bit my lip. I could have imagined Fox at school. She didn't fit in there at all. She didn't look as it should, she did not behave as she should. She belonged to the forest.
“If you hang out with her, everyone will decide that you, too, are a fool.” Well, of course, this is nothing new ...
Now, when he began to tease me, the tension disappeared from his voice. I turned and went into the house to take a shower before dinner.
The next few weeks went wonderfully. My mother was unpacking things and was apparently only glad that I spent all the evenings with my girlfriend.
However, on Saturday, just before the school year was supposed to begin, my mother announced that we were going to visit our neighbors on a barbecue near their pool.
“Cindy Gordon is just your age,” she told me. “And Mrs. Gordon is the counselor of the local squad of senior girl scouts. ” I talked to her about being appointed assistant counselor.
I must have frowned because she asked:
“Why do you have such a terrible face?”
“I ... uh ... I'm not sure if I want to sign up for scouts,” I said hesitantly. “You know, being a scout was good as long as I was a little girl, but it seems to me ...”
“Don't be silly,” my mother interrupted. “You always liked being a scout!”
I never liked being a scout. But my mother liked being a counselor.
“I can't go to the barbecue tonight,” I said. - I was going to Sarah. She is waiting for me.
“Do you want me to call her mother and say that you cannot come?” I'm sure she will understand.
“I don't have her number, and she doesn't have a mother.” I have to go to her house.
My mother's eyebrows moved even more, and I realized that she was thinking about Sarah's family. I should not say that she has no mother. It just got off my tongue.
But mother has already lost interest in my difficulties.
“There is no time for that now.” You have to help me make a potato salad.
She headed to the kitchen.
“But I need to go to Sarah to tell her that I can't play with her tonight!”
My father was in the kitchen, he took beer from the refrigerator. Hearing my words, he frowned.
“Your mother organized this barbecue, and this is our debut here,” he said. “We should all be.” Really right?
The last words were addressed to my mother.
“It will be a lot of fun there,” she answered briskly. “You will like the Gordons.”
It was unclear whether she was addressing me or my father; in any case, none of us answered. Father went to the door, carrying his beer to the living room, where he was about to read the newspaper.
I had no options. I went to the Gordon barbecue. Cindy Gordon turned out to be a slender girl with records on her teeth and a short blond haircut. Her brother Andrew was the blond I saw in the forest.
Cindy and I sat next to each on the sun loungers. Andrew and Mark swam; our parents were on the other side of the pool.
- Do you miss your friends in Connecticut? She asked. - It's probably terrible to move.
- No, everything seems to be fine.
I did not tell her that I did not have real friends in Connecticut. There were several guys with whom we hung out together, but they could not be called friends. I loved to read and studied well. Both that, and another caused suspicion.
- What have you been doing since you moved?
- I read it. Looped around. Not so much.
I did not mention Lisa - hardly Cindy knew her. I sat looking at the ice in my glass of soda.
“My mother says you're going to join the scout squad?”
I looked at Cindy. She tried her best to show friendliness and seemed like a smart girl.
“Yes, my mother says that too.”
- It's not so bad. Last year, we sailed on the rapids on rafts.
She told me about how they rafted on the Stanislaus River, and it sounded very interesting. It's much better than sticking labels on cigar boxes - what we mainly did in Connecticut.
We left the Gordon house at about five. I finally wanted to go to Lisa, but my mother did not let me in. She again had this her family mood, and therefore I had to stay at home, even though my father was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper, my brother was watching TV, and she herself was
solving a crossword puzzle.
“You will not die if you stay with your family a little,” she said.
Going to bed, I realized that I could not fall asleep. I heard parents arguing below - my mother talked about how she would like to spend more time with the Gordons, and my father ridiculed this idea. This went on for a while, then they went to sleep. The house was quiet, but I was lying with my eyes open, wondering if Fox had missed me this evening.
I twitched and found no peace, and in the end I could no longer stay in bed. I quietly got up, dressed, sneaked up the stairs and got out of the house onto the dirt road that led to the house of Fox. Light penetrated from the backyards through the hedges and it was not too dark on the road. Then I turned off the road into the forest - and there it was already dark for real. A month hung in the sky, but only a little light was sifted through the foliage.
At night, the forest looked different. Something constantly rustled in the bushes. Even though I knew the way, it always seemed to me that I was lost. I could not stop thinking about zombies and high school students seeking adventure. Both dangers seemed equally threatening.
I went to the clearing of Fox. It was strange to be here in the middle of the night. I saw some movement among the shadows and froze in place.
A fox came out of the shadow falling from the chair. In the moonlight, her fur seemed silver gray and her eyes were golden. She sat down, carefully wrapping her tail around herself, and began to carefully examine me, as if making some decision. Then she got up and ran jogging towards the house of Fox.
After hesitating, I followed her. The light was on in the kitchen window, I could see Gus sitting on the kitchen table. Having propped his head with his hand, he wrote something in a notebook. In the light of a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, I saw black shadows under his eyes, sad wrinkles on his lips.
I hesitated, looking inward. The thought came to me to turn around and go home - but I could not once again walk through the dark forest alone. I knocked softly on the door and began to look out the window as Gus rises to let me in.
Until now, I have not been to their house. The sink in the kitchen was littered with dirty dishes, but this did not attract my attention. Bookshelves stretched along all the walls, some were full of books to the brim, others with papers. It seemed very unusual to me: bookshelves in the kitchen!
“Triton,” Gus said softly. - I'm glad to see you.
He did not ask me why I ended up on the street as late as any other adult would. And it seemed to me that he was really glad to see me.
- Does the Fox sleep?
“I'm afraid so.”
- Oh. And I wanted to talk to her. She ... she is not angry with me?
Gus moved his eyebrows and sat down at the kitchen table, gesturing to me in the second chair.
- She was upset that you did not come.
- Mother made me go to the barbecue to Cindy Gordon. Cindy's mom is a counselor in a scout squad, and my mother wants to be an assistant counselor, and therefore I will also have to enroll in the squad ... But I still came, although I was scared!
I don't really know why, but having expressed all this, I burst into tears - because I was afraid that Lisa was angry with me, because I was really scared in the forest, and now I was safe because Gus was kind to me ... suddenly I just could not help crying.
Gus raised his hand, stopping me before I really began.
“Relax, Triton.” Take a deep breath. - For a while he silently looked at me. “You know, you really didn't want to tell me all this.” You wanted to tell Sarah - that is, Fox.
Without rising, he reached out to the bookshelf and pulled out a spiral notebook and pencil.
- Write it. Write her a note and explain what happened. I will see that Fox reads it.
“But why can't you just tell her yourself?”
He leaned back in his chair.
- If I begin to talk about this, I will speak in my own words. You have to choose your own words. Tell your truth. It is important.
I sat down on the kitchen table and wrote to Lisa a long note about how I could not call her because I did not know her number, and how my mother did not allow me to go to her, and how I slipped out after dark and saw a fox on clearing. I wrote how sorry I was that I could not come. Then I tore out the sheets and handed them to Gus.
“Will you pass this on to Fox?”
- Sure.
I gave him the notebook. He opened it on the first page and wrote a phone number on it.
“This is our number,” he said, handing me a notebook. - Keep a notebook for yourself. You'll write all sorts of other things there.
- Which things?
He shrugged.
- All sorts. What is happening to you. What you are afraid of. What you think of yourself. Sometimes it helps - record it all. Come on, I'll take you home.
Now that Gus was nearby, the forest did not seem scary to me. The shadows were just shadows. Mysterious noises came from birds and mice, and from cars far away on the road. He broke up with me at the back gate of our house.
* * *
The next day I found Lisa in a clearing in an armchair.
“Hi, Fox,” I said. “I'm sorry I had to go to this stupid barbecue yesterday.”
“Dad handed me your note.”
“He said you were angry with me.”
She shrugged.
- Well yes. But he said that not all parents understand everything as he does. That some just poke around with their children.
- He correctly noticed it.
“So it's all right.” Let's go to the tunnel.
The tunnel we called the pipe. Sometimes we went deep into the darkness, and the Fox invented all sorts of stories: we were the first explorers in the deepest cave in the world; we were rebels hiding in the Paris sewers; we traveled to the center of the earth where dinosaurs still lived.
On that day, Fox did not come up with anything. We just walked farther into the darkness, and the cold water spread in our sneakers. We have already gone quite far when Lisa said:
“You saw the fox last night.” What do you think of her?
“She was very pretty.”
- What were her eyes?
I regretted that I did not see the face of Fox. Her voice sounded strange - high and tense.
I remembered the golden eyes of the fox.
“Such as if ... as if she knew what I was thinking,” I replied.
For a while, Fox was silent. Then she said:
- My mother was very beautiful. I remember that she had very small hands. And her hair was the same color as fox fur. Such, rusty-red-brown.
I hesitated.
“Do you really think she turned into a fox?” I asked carefully.
The fox stopped in place. I heard her breathing in the dark; somewhere, water gurgled.
“Sometimes you just need to believe in something crazy,” she whispered in the dark. “Because all the other things that you need to believe in are hurting too much.” You see, of course, I can try to believe in something else. For example, that she just left us with my dad and ran away with some other guy. But it seems to me that turning into a fox would be really cool. I understand why she might want this. I like to think that she is a fox and lives in the forest. So this is what I believe in.
“I see,” I said. Her words really had some kind of delusional meaning. I rummaged in the dark and took her hand. “Okay, then I will believe it too.”
“Let's go look at the newts,” said the Fox, leading me away from the darkness.
The next week, classes began at school. I had an English lesson, the teacher was just doing the roll call when I saw Fox in the back row. Her face was thoroughly washed, she was wearing a clean shirt and velvet pants - not dirty and not torn. I stubbornly looked in her direction, but she did not answer in my opinion.
The teacher, Miss Parsons, was a reverent woman with thin hair and a high, panting voice. On that first day, she read us a poem about daffodils and asked us
what we think of him. It seemed to me not very interesting, but I did not begin to say this.
When the lesson was over, I hurried to catch Fox at the door.
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